Split This Rock celebrates poetry of provocation and witness and the role of poet as public citizen. In a time of multiple wars, economic, social, and environmental crises, this panel will discuss the role of poets and poetry in public life. Shelley described the poet as "unacknowledged legislator." What does this mean in the age of Fox News and corporate lobbyists? What are some of the ways that poets are engaging with the larger public in the United States and abroad? Who are the models for this work? How might we begin to think of ourselves as undivided: both citizen and poet?

Melissa Tuckeyis a poet, activist, and translator. She’s author of /Rope as Witness/ (chapbook: Pudding house) and has received numerous awards for her work, including a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship.She’s a co-founder of Split This Rock, and currently lives in Ithaca, New York.

Toi Derricotteearned her B.A. in special education from Wayne State University and her M.A. in English literature from New York University. Her books of poetry include Tender (1997) which won the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize; Captivity (1989); Natural Birth (1983); and The Empress of the Death House (1978). She is also the author of a literary memoir, The Black Notebooks (W.W. Norton, 1997), which won the 1998 Annisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction.

Martín Espada has published seventeen books in all as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. The Republic of Poetry, a collection of poems published by Norton in 2006, received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; his next collection, The Trouble Ball, is forthcoming from Norton in spring 2011. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Carolyn Forché is the author of four books of poetry: Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2004); The Angel of History (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us (1982), which received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes (1976), which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.. Carolyn Forché teaches in the MFA Program at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Mark Nowak is a documentary poet, social critic, and labor activist, whose writings include Shut Up Shut Down (afterword by Amiri Baraka), a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” and the recently published book on coal mining disasters in the US and China, Coal Mountain Elementary (2009), that Howard Zinn has called “a stunning educational tool.”

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Blog This Rock

The blog of Split This Rock, the national network of socially engaged poets. Programs include a biennial national festival, readings, workshops, contests, the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism, e-publishing, youth programs, and campaigns that integrate poetry into movements for social change.

About Me

Blog This Rock is a community forum sponsored by Split This Rock, an organization that calls poets to the center of public life and celebrates and promotes socially engaged poetry.
You are invited to our nation’s capital for our next poetry festival in March 2016.
Split This Rock Poetry Festival will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions on poetry and social change, youth programming, films, parties, and activism—a unique opportunity to hone our activist skills while we assess and debate the public role of the poet and the poem in times of crisis.